


History of Loss

by notraelet



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Child Abuse, Gen, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-10
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-11-25 00:12:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/633041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notraelet/pseuds/notraelet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Over the years, he's lost everyone.</i>
</p><p>An Isaac Lahey character study fic in which everyone around him seems to leave him or die terribly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	History of Loss

The sun was beating down on the chipped concrete of the driveway on the day that Isaac’s mother’s car pulled out of it, taking her and everything she’d managed to pack up that one last time.

Years later, he would remember this because the heat from the asphalt burned his small feet as he ran out after her with his brother right behind him. Isaac remembered the sandpaper in his throat from the pollen in the air as he tried to scream after her and not a sound came out. He remembered heavy arms wrapping across his chest, Camden holding him back from running out into the middle of the street and getting hit by a car.

He remembered the phone calls to the police, to the lawyers they couldn’t afford, remembered peeking from around the corner and seeing his father sitting at the table with his head bowed in his hands and a generous helping of rust-colored liquid in his glass.

Isaac remembered the hole that she left, he remembered when it was fresh and gaping in each of their chests, but he couldn’t remember exactly what she looked like. His father had taken down her photographs, burned their wedding album, cut her out of the boys’ baby pictures, like she had never existed at all. Her features had eventually faded from his memory, leaving nothing but dreams of faceless women with long, dishwater blonde hair.

And that was alright. The shock set in on the day she left, shattered their lives as it rippled through the family she’d left behind, but gradually, it stopped hurting as much. Gradually, they forgot his mother was ever there, and time went on. His father sat down with more drinks, asked more and more of Camden, and took over the business of maintaining the family graveyard when Isaac’s grandfather died.

Life returned to normal, and Isaac learned then, that the world didn’t stop spinning just because you lost someone.  
_  
Isaac, barely in sixth grade, would sit in the corner of the hallway and listen as his brother and father fought. Good old Cam gave it as good as he got, and the screams and yells and shattered glass became a weekly form of passing the time in their family.

He didn’t get into Stanford. He didn’t get into Berkeley. He didn’t even get into Irving fucking Valley. He was just a dumb jock, he’d never amount to anything in his life, he was the reason Mother left, he was a failure of a son.

These days, Isaac would curl his arms around his knees, just out of sight, and try to imagine big, strong Camden winning one of the fights. Getting into his car like Mother did all those years ago, and hesitating just before he backed out of the driveway. Isaac would imagine Cam rolling down the window, smiling at him, and saying get in, Isaac, we’re leaving.

Camden might have been big, and he might have been a little bit slow and kind of mean to everyone else, but he was always a barrier between Isaac and their father, and he was always willing to open up his door in the middle of the night and tiredly try to reassure Isaac that the monsters in the basement weren’t real.

He imagined Camden would take him away, far away from the shadows and memories in their old, worn home. Instead, Cam stopped long enough on his way out the door to tousle Isaac’s hair before he left, dogtags jingling slightly with every step.  
_  
It didn’t take a genius to figure out that Cam had been driven out by their father. That one too many fights had pushed him over the edge, into the only way he could get out without living on the streets.

There were two years of that. Seventh grade came and went with a letter, an e-mail, a throaty laugh over the phone. Eighth grade Isaac got his first C minus and subsequently found out that the monsters in the basement were real after all.

On a warm Spring day, the phone call came. Isaac answered it, his words slurred from a bruised jaw, and he didn’t recognize the voice on the other end of the line.

When his father took the phone, he disappeared into the study and Isaac knew better than to bother him with questions. The sound of glass shattering resonated throughout the house, furniture being knocked over, books being thrown and there, just faint underneath the big sounds of anger, was a soft, mournful sob of guilt and loss.

In retrospect, Isaac figured that he knew before the words came out of his father’s mouth when he emerged the next day. He knew before the letter came, and with it, the medal and the flag that his father locked away, far out of sight.  
_  
Word caught on at school. His teachers asked him if he wanted an extension on his homework assignments. His principal set him up with an appointment at the school counselor.

But the most, the worst, were the stares. Soft, pitiful little looks when nobody thought he was looking. The quiet boy in the back of the class, he’d lost his brother, his brother had gotten shot, no, he’d been blown up and they sent him home in a shoebox, no, he was stabbed four times in the chest by a crazy native.

Isaac kept his head down. He did his homework. He studied. He ignored the rest of the world.

He knew better now, than to fight back when his father started yelling. He knew better than to ditch school out of spite. He knew better than to resist at all.

It didn’t stop his nails from breaking against the concrete of the basement as he desperately tried to break free of the grip his father had on his ankle. Didn’t stop the blood from running down his hands, the bruises on his knuckles as he struck out against the inside of the freezer.

You’re the reason, he’d hear, and the voice resonated through his spine, shivering down his ribcage, stealing his breath in a small sob that he’d never admit to letting out. You’re the reason she left, the reason he died, they didn’t want to deal with a fuckup like you.  
_  
When he saw his father murdered, Isaac was frozen to the spot, his heart in his chest. He could hear it, the sound of claws ripping through flesh, rendering the person into just a body within seconds. And he could smell it, not long after. Blood mingled in with the rain, dribbling down onto the streets and in through the grates.

He supposed that he should feel triumphant. Happy.

Instead, he remembered the way his father would lift him up onto his shoulders, cook dinner and dance with his mother in the kitchen. He remembered the sobs behind closed doors that he pretended never to hear. Remembered the cups that kept getting refilled with bourbon, the defeated look that fell on Lahey’s face when he thought nobody could see him.

He remembered a father, and the smiles and the bedtime stories, and the scattershots of kindness between the beatings. The man who sank into his own misery and systematically destroyed the world around him because he could not blame himself.

Smelling the blood made his stomach roil, and knowing what it signified sent dread knifing hot through his heart. And he stood there, frozen to the spot, his hair plastered to his face, water soaking in through his ratted sweatshirt as the blood mixed with the water and slowly staled.

His sneakers made pathetic sloshing sounds in the rain as he took one step, and then another, and the dark shadow of the car finally swam into focus in the rain. Silently, his hand reached out, brushed against the twisted metal of the door frame, as he took in the sight of his father laying before him, eyes wide open and glassy.

He didn’t even really look like a person anymore, lying there, with his body ripped to shreds. Pieces of his ribcage jutted out from his open chest, intestines draped down across the driver’s seat, his arm was twisted the wrong way and barely connected to his shoulder.

Systematically, Isaac had lost everyone. As he stared down, expressionless, at the body of the man who had loved and hated him, he realized that now he was alone. And with that revelation, with the image of this eviscerated man burned into his memory, he could not bring himself to cry. It just felt cold, numb, hollow.

Isaac took one step back, his shoes spattered red, and then another. He took the first breath he could remember taking since he first heard his mother’s car pulling out of the driveway when he was nine years old.

He turned and ran.


End file.
